Two Tales of Glory and Honor

Welcome to the sixth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s topic comes to us from Quintrala of Speed Fairy . She suggests to “write a short fiction story about the dissolution of the BoB alliance. It could be from BoB’s point of view, the Goons’, by neutrals in 0.0, civilians in Empire, NPCs or even rats. Write about before, during or after the coup; give us stories of market, war, people or love. In-character or roleplay. We want to know what happened, from those fictional characters that, in your mind, were part of it.”

. . .

Standing with his fellow Goons in the hangar at their staging area, Joey Acidinyershorts grinned. Only a month ago, he’d been persuaded by some of his buddies to train as a capsuleer and join up with Goonfleet. He’d been proud to take part in a couple of their legendary “Jihadswarm” operations, steamrollering a few stupid carebear miners and coming away with plenty of loot. Now, though, he’d heard rumors of something bigger in the works, and the fleet commander was about to give them details.

“I can’t tell you what’s going on exactly,” began the fleet commander, “but there’s something big going on. When it does, we’re going to be engaging in a massive push into BoB space, hitting those R-tards with everything we’ve got. We’re going to just run ’em right over, storm through Querious and Delve. Our Great Leader, Darius Johnson, has promised that he’s gonna have breakfast in NOL-M9, and you’re all invited!”

A mighty cheer rose from the assembled throngs.

“You all know what to do,” continued the fleet commander. “Tacklers, get in and point their capitals ASAP, so we can take out their top DPS. Keep an eye out for ECM. We’re gonna drill on this till you get it right. Be strong, brosefs!”

. . .

“The news isn’t good,” said Dianabolic, CEO of Reikoku, to the assembled corp members. “Yesterday, Haargoth Agamar, one of the directors of Black Nova, defected to the Goons, taking a lot of materiel and ISK with him. What’s more, he completely disbanded the Band of Brothers alliance before he split.”

A gasp rose from the assembled corporation members, Kazume Nakatani among them. He’d been flying for Reikoku for about a year and a half, training in various industrial disciplines in addition to Caldari war vessels. They’d been reaping the benefits of Band of Brothers’ sovereignty in at least two areas of lawless space, to the tune of billions of ISK in profit.

“We’ve shifted to the KenZoku alliance, which was an allied industrial alliance we set up,” continued Dianabolic. “For now, though, we’ve started seeing Goon encroachments on our space, to which we’re obviously going to lose sovereignty. I want us out there camping the chokepoint gates, doing our best to keep them from moving in on us. We’ve got to try and hold out.”

As they left the assembly hall, one of Kaz’s friends turned to him. “I can’t believe we’ve been tricked like that,” she said. “Do you think we can hold out?”

Of course, the Goon attack had gone pretty much as planned, sending spearheads deep into Querious, attacking and destroying former BoB stations and mounting their own in a rush to claim sovereignty as quickly as they could. The leaders of KenZoku were determined not to lose Delve as well, so they prepared to make a stand at UHKL-N, at the border of Delve space.

In his Drake Double Dragon, Kazume watched the gate to A-BO4V carefully, hovering 20 kilometers away, ready to turn his missiles on any ships that came though and were tackled by the smaller ships orbiting the gate. Two other battleships, an Apocalypse and a Megathron, hovered nearby, ready to do the same thing, Also near the gate, a heavy interdictor waited to drop warp interdiction spheres, keeping any ships coming through the gate from getting away. And more ships waited in the background.

Suddenly the gate flashed, and ships began decloaking in front of the gate. The interceptors stood out on the tactical overview in blood-red. Instantly a warning was barked over the tactical channel: “Point the ‘ceptors, point the ‘ceptors.”

Kaz locked his weapons onto the nearest interceptor, a Taranis, as the tacklers near the gate engaged their stasis webs and warp scramblers. Missiles streaked from his launchers, finding their mark and flaring against the smaller vessel’s shields.

Kaz craned his neck to look behind him. He didn’t see the telltale light display of a cynosaural field, but his tactical overview told him it was somewhere in the system. And that meant just one thing: Trouble.

. . .

In a nearby system, Joey waited in his Rifter, which (of course) he hadn’t bothered to name. Large numbers of other ships were gathered nearby, all dwarfed by an Avatar, one of the prides of Goonfleet. Cannily, the Goons had enlisted the assistance of another pilot, unknown to the members of BoB/KenZoku, who had managed to slip from Aridia into Delve, and was now positioned in UHKL-N, ready to provide the target for the titan to activate its jump bridge. Those Kenny ‘tards will never know what hit ’em, he thought.

“Go, go, go!” came the signal over the communicator, as the Avatar engaged the jump bridge. “When you get through, warp straight to the gate, we’ll get that camp.”

Joey engaged his ship’s engines, rushing through the jump bridge, then warping towards the gate. His warp was stopped by the interdictor bubble around the gate, of course, but the gate wasn’t his target; the ships around the edge, presently hurling missiles, gunfire, and laser fire at the Goon ships coming through the gate, were.

He and three other Rifter pilots set course for one of the battleships, a Drake. Each of them targeted it, activated their webs and scramblers, and set up to orbit it at close range, where its weapons couldn’t track them. Behind them, battleships and battlecruisers would be blasting away at the enemy ships as soon as they warped in.

Kaz’s tactical systems screamed at him as the scramblers and webbers quickly pinned him, overwhelming his ship’s defenses. He yelled for backup over the channel, but no one else was in a position to assist. Snarling, he deactivated one of his missile launchers, targeted a Rifter, and began launching missiles at it, hoping against hope that they’d hit.

Joey’s ship rocked as the Caldari Navy missiles found their mark. Gritting his teeth, he held on as the shield flickered and died, and his armor began to melt away under the onslaught. He held the lock as long as he could, managing to get his pod clear of the battle as soon as his ship met a fiery demise.

Kaz, too, held out as long as he could, but the fire being poured onto his ship was too much for it. As the Drake violently exploded, he tried to get away, but the Goon tacklers were too quick to lock his pod and bring it to a halt. The last thing he heard was the hideous crack! as his pod’s hull failed…at least, until he woke up in a clone vat bay.

The KenZoku gate camp quickly fell to pieces under the onslaught With nothing to stop them, the Goons poured through, aiming to meet up with another group that was pouring through at 1DH-SX. Soon, both Joey and Kaz would be back in the fight…but on much different terms.

. . .

Three weeks later:

The influence map showed the results clearly; Querious and Delve, once blue with the influence of the Band of Brothers, had been entirely covered in GoonSwarm yellow. Erbo looked up from the map and shook his head.

Damn, those Goons sure moved in fast, he thought, turning his attention to the ice asteroid in front of him. He adjusted Tourmaline Queen‘s attitude as the blue beams of the ice harvesters began chewing into the surface of the massive chunk of ice. Beside him, he could see Time Killer doing the same thing. Nearby, he could see Valorna’s Iteron Mark III, turning to depart with a load of ice…and beyond, Selena keeping a watch in the massive Mystic Ballbreaker.

It’s all a long way from here, though, he thought, and 0.0 is definitely a “no go” for us right now. Besides, there’s work to be done here.

He turned back, his eyes looking up at the distant sky.

. . .

Other articles published from around the EVE Blogosphere (links will be updated here as new posts are added):

Tony, I did the best I could. I don’t know a damn thing about what goes on out there, so I employed a combination of basic research and the time-honored technique of “making shit up as I go.” I had to give the Reikoku pilot a Japanese-type name, and the Goon pilot a name that sounds like something that would come off SomethingAwful.com. The system names should be correct, but I don’t know whether the tactic of titan-bridging a fleet behind a gatecamp would work on Tranquility.

The objective was to show a kind of “lower decks” view of the conflict, from the point of view of two of the ordinary pilots caught up in the war, and how they came together without realizing it. The end cameo by the Ralpha Dogs is intended to imply that there’s a lot more going on in New Eden than they know about. (Which is true.)